Comic Monthly 1922: Exploring Form and Themes

Abstract

The paper will study the first monthly comic book, Comic Monthly, issued in 1922. Thus, this year not only enriched the traditional ‘text’ literature but also witnessed the birth of the modern sequential narrative phenomenon. The analysis of the twelve issues will be informed by a close reading of the texts. The exploration will be done under the broad theoretical framework of sequential narrativity developed by Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics, 1992) and Theiry Groensteen (System of Comics, 2007) for exploring the themes of gender, race, nationalism, and social politics represented in them through formalistic architectonics and as to how these themes were reflective of the American zeitgeist. The influence of parallel media of expression like film and literature, on the form and themes of these comic books would be calibrated. These influences were relayed in some form or another into the construction of the later day comics. Hence these texts would be explored as the precursors of modern-day sequential narrative formats (David Kunzle, 1990). These texts will give a rare glimpse to the first attempts at sequential narration in a magazine format and how that contributed to the development of the art-form in the long run. Thus, this paper will collate the influences on the narrative structure of the early comic books, and how the themes depicted were reflective of the general socio-economic, political, and cultural nuances (Denis Gilford, 1990). This study will add to the already established discipline of comics historiography (Ashkenazi and Dittmar, 2019).